Neil & Patti, Jack & Me ...

Check out this fine post by Ben Greenman on Patti Smith and Neil Young, writing books and albums, and living life, may be found at the New Yorker site.  Finer grained than average coverage of an average book expo event than you'd expect.

(If you have trouble with the above link, cut and paste this:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/06/neil-young-and-patti-smith.html)

Speaking of writing, I will be doing a lot more of it in the foreseeable future, just not nearly as much here at Issa's Untidy Hut.  I've been solicited to produce a piece of writing that I'm at once honored and humbled to be doing.  It will take me more than a few months to do, so the lights will dim down here for awhile, though they won't go out entirely.

I'm going to try to live up to my Wednesday Haiku commitment to post once a week and, if I miss a week now and again, at least you may trust it's with good reason and not by neglect or intent.

What the writing project is I need to keep under wraps for the moment. You folks will be among the first to know once there is clearance.

There is a nice article in a local publication, The Strip (Summer 2012), about Lawrenceville (a Pittsburgh neighborhood) authors, which contains a brief mention of Lilliput Review and Past All Traps.  A tip of the hat to Jude Wudarczyk:

Finally, I've been reading very, very slowly Jack Kerouac's Book of Haikus again.  Here's two from last night's reading:

Flowers
  aim crookedly
At the straight death

I don't care
  what
thusness is

flitting butterfly--
thus is Buddha's law
in this world

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don

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Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 129 songs

Dylan on Writing: "Someplace Else is Always a Heartbeat Away"

There is a great interview from the early 90s with Bob Dylan by Paul Zollo of American Songwriter.  The following three questions are from that interview and may be of interest to writers particularly fascinated with inspiration.  Definitely check out the full interview here, as well as material leading up to the interview here.  


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When you write songs, do you try to consciously guide the meaning or do you try to follow subconscious directions? 

Well, you know, motivation is something you never know behind any song, really. Anybody’s song, you never know what the motivation was. It’s nice to be able to put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind. And block yourself off to where you can control it all, take it down. Edgar Allan Poe must have done that. People who are dedicated writers, of which there are some, but mostly people get their information today over a television set or some kind of a way that’s hitting them on all their senses. It’s not just a great novel anymore. You have to be able to get the thoughts out of your mind.

How do you do that?

Well, first of all, there’s two kinds of thoughts in your mind: there’s good thoughts and evil thoughts. Both come through your mind. Some people are more loaded down with one than another. Nevertheless, they come through. And you have to be able to sort them out, if you want to be a songwriter, if you want to be a good song singer. You must get rid of all that baggage. You ought to be able to sort out those thoughts, because they don’t mean anything, they’re just pulling you around, too. It’s important to get rid of all them thoughts. Then you can do something from some kind of surveillance of the situation. You have some kind of place where you can see but it can’t affect you. Where you can bring something to the matter, besides just take, take, take, take, take. As so many situations in life are today. Take, take, take, that’s all that it is. What’s in it for me? That syndrome which started in the “Me Decade,” whenever that was. We’re still in that. It’s still happening.

Is songwriting for you more a sense of taking something from some place else? 

Well, someplace else is always a heartbeat away. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s no rule. That’s what makes it so attractive. There isn’t any rule. You can still have your wits about you and do something that gets you off in a multitude of ways.

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Here's Bob Dylan's performance to honor Martin Scorsese this week at the Critic's Choice Awards.  Getting old, the voice is crusty, but the heart is on fire:

the mountain road's
twisting, winding
heart

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

best,

Don

PS  Get 2 free issues. Get 2 more free issues

Lillie poem archive

Send a single haiku for the Wednesday Haiku feature. Here's how.

Go to the LitRock web site for a list of all 127 songs

Subscribe to Lilliput Review

 

Louise Glück on Writing

In a recent interview with the Yale Daily News, Louise Glück had this to say about how writing never gets any easier:

Q: If you had to give one piece of advice to young writers, what would you say?

A: I think young writers need to know that it never gets easy. The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there’s no struggle, there’s no torment, there’s no sense that the thing you’ve embarked on is a catastrophe. I’ve been seriously writing since I was in my earliest teens, and I suffer the same torments that I did then. And the only difference is that now I know they’re never going to go away.

For those with an interest in the Eastern forms (and the philosophy that underlies them), one might simply say "Life never gets any easier," which is much the same thing. For the full interview, check here.

Elms

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.

Louise Glück

And from the master:

a long night--
the devil in me
torments me

Issa
translated by David G. Lanoue

best,
Don